


If The Right One Came Along

by lady_ragnell



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Anniversary, Episode Related, Friendship/Love, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 15:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15688512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Two years after they join the RAC, Dutch starts worrying that something is wrong with John.





	If The Right One Came Along

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariel_astaire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariel_astaire/gifts).



> Written for **ariel_astaire/astairelover** for a fic for charity drive, with thanks for the donation and also thanks for giving me the excuse to get out some of my many feelings about 4x01.
> 
> Title from "I've Got This Friend" by the Civil Wars.

Something is wrong with Johnny.

It's been building for weeks, but they've had a busy rash of warrants, and usually John can only stand an hour of something bothering him before he starts complaining about it, so Dutch ignored it, decided that when he was annoyed enough or worried enough, he would bring it up. He always does, even when he thinks it will piss her off, like needing to spend some joy on a replacement part for Lucy because he can tell she's not running as fast as she could.

But he doesn't, and Dutch is left frowning to herself after their latest warrant, when Johnny is gone after being overly bright and helpful for the entire mission wrap-up.

“Lucy,” she says, trying to think it through, “John hasn't asked anything new or different of you lately, has he?”

“Negative,” Lucy responds immediately. It's anyone's guess if she's fudging her protocols, Johnny has been a terrible influence on her. “Are you concerned about John?”

Concerned. Dutch examines the word from every angle she can think of, mostly because she doesn't know. It's not an emotion she's had much cause to feel, in the past. But if anyone could make her feel it, it's John, who seems to teach her a new shade of feeling every week, even if half of them are various kinds of exasperation. “Let me know if he asks you anything out of the ordinary,” she says instead of answering. It's the best she can do for now.

*

Asking John if he's okay has never gotten Dutch a useful answer. Either he tells her he's fine and seems offended that she would ask, or he starts a playful litany of complaints about her always upstaging his moves while they're on a warrant. She can tell when he's lying or obscuring something, but she can't tell what's going on behind the lies.

She does the next best thing to asking and takes him out to get drunk on some of Pree's most lethal hokk.

“Celebrating something, sugar?” Pree asks when she orders, leaving Johnny at a table, where he already seems to be cheerfully annoying someone nearby. Probably not badly enough to get in a fight, but she shouldn't linger. “Anniversary? Big score? Do tell.”

Dutch takes the glasses when he pours them, just a little fuller than he does for people who aren't his friends. “No gossip.” Pree is smart, and she can't bring herself to say that she trusts him, full stop, but she trusts him to have John's best interests at heart, at least as he understands them. “An interrogation, actually. Has he seemed off to you, lately?”

Pree frowns, tapping his chin with dramatic seriousness. “Nothing strange that I've noticed,” he finally says. “But you two have been busy with the warrants, so I'm not sure I'd know.” He looks at her, and it will never stop disconcerting her, how fast he can see through whatever walls she puts up. “I'll keep an eye on him. Nothing bothers him while we're around, right?”

“Right,” says Dutch, and takes the drinks over to Johnny.

He takes one sip before he raises his eyebrows at her, a flash of something she doesn't recognize crossing his face before it melts into plain curiosity. “This is the kind of hokk that comes either with good news or bad news.”

“Tonight, it's the kind of hokk that comes with a lot of annoying jobs in a row done well.” She toasts him.

Something about that doesn't quite satisfy him, doesn't quite answer whatever question he wasn't asking, but Dutch doesn't ask her questions either, so she can't quite blame him. Either way, he seems to decide that unasked questions aren't worth fretting about and moves on to getting drunk.

The plan backfires, even when Dutch switches to the cheaper stuff after the first round, when their palates are already ruined and it won't matter so much, the quality of the hokk she brings to the table. Pree refills glasses with his eyebrows raised, and Dutch plies John with drinks, hoping he'll edge into being a maudlin drunk as he sometimes does. It's the only reason she knows anything about his life before he walked onto Lucy at all.

Instead, he's cheerful, almost manically so. He laughs, and sings, and manages to tempt Dutch into just a little bar brawl to let some steam off, and grins at her the whole time like nothing is wrong at all.

Dutch's gut churns, and when she goes to settle up her tab with Pree, he's frowning too. “Maybe he could let some steam off upstairs?” he offers.

Dutch stays emphatically out of John's sex life, and he out of hers. She's uncomfortable with how easy it is for him, and he just doesn't ask her, on the rare occasions she trusts someone enough to fuck them, and while they've never talked about it, even mentioning Pree's upstairs rooms would tip him off that she's noticed something strange. “He'll have to think of that one on his own,” she says, with a little tinge of regret.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind. There are a few who would just eat him right up.”

“Job offer's always open, right?”

“For him, not you. You'd stab too many of my customers,” says Pree, and kisses her on the cheek before he sends her away.

*

Dutch gets back to Lucy after meeting with Bellus, their latest job broker, to ask questions about an upcoming warrant, and finds John under the pilot's console, chatting away with Lucy. “—best shape possible, just in case,” he's telling her.

“Just in case of what?” Dutch asks, and normally she'd take a little guilty satisfaction in the way his head bangs against the console, but there's still a cold knot of anxiety in her chest.

When he comes out, he's smiling at her, but it took him half a second too long to collect himself. “In case we get in a daring chase on this next warrant, of course. I've got a feeling about it. The ones Joe mentions to you are always like that, and also I'm pretty sure Bellus is out to kill me. I still maintain that the whole misunderstanding is not my fault.”

Lying, lying, lying. Dutch is unsettled and she hates it. It's too much of a lesson on how much she's come to rely on John in the time she's known him. He's her partner, her best friend, her closest companion, and if she can't keep him happy, she doesn't know what good to him she is. “You do seem to inspire women to want to shoot you.”

“Yeah, but most of them get fond of me afterwards.” His smile falls off his face for a second and comes back as worry. “You okay? You're being kind of weird.”

Dutch blinks, brought up short. Of course she is, but only because he is, and now that he's mentioned it she can't turn the question back on him. “I'm fine. It's just—you'd tell me if—” _You'd tell me if I'd fucked us up somehow, wouldn't you?_ she wants to ask, but the words get stuck in her throat.

“I'd tell you if what?” he asks, suddenly wary.

“Nothing. Bellus says the warrant is ready when we are, so whatever you're doing, you'd better finish it up.”

Johnny doesn't look angry, or even sad, or surprised. He's wearing the same smile he does when he's trying to ignore something that's upsetting him, and Dutch wants to reach out and just ask, but she'd choke if she even tried, so she just hurries him through cleaning up his tools and getting ready for the next warrant. He's usually better after they've had the chance to go on a tearing chase through the Quad for someone else the Company is after.

*

The job goes smoothly enough that Dutch wishes the warrant would run or fight or do something else less dull, because neither she nor John has a chance to really work up much adrenaline before they're reporting to RAC headquarters to hand in the man they were after and get their joy.

Johnny wanders off when it's done, to one of the other friends Dutch pretends she isn't a little bit jealous of, and Dutch thinks about chasing after him, but runs into Joe first. He's in headquarters less and less these days and won't talk about the warrants he takes, probably taking the hardest jobs, the worst ones, to make enough money to retire on, so it's a happy surprise, and they end up in a break closet passing his flask back and forth.

“Heard about your job,” he says after a while. “You finally going to stop getting yourself almost killed on every warrant you take?”

Dutch grins at him. “But it's so fun.”

“Yeah, maybe, and maybe Jaqobis likes the thought of retiring after you've put enough service in, not dying in some kind of shootout.”

She shrugs. As much as it terrifies her whenever she looks at John after a fight and finds him staggering and bloody, he always grins out from behind the blood and dirt, like he loves it all as much as she does. She'd like him to retire safe, but she's not going to ask him to stop taking risks either. “We so rarely get into shootouts. Brawls are more our style.”

“Almost two years with the RAC and you two still act like kids whenever you get to break your weapons out.”

Two years as killjoys. Two years as Johnny's partner in name, and traveling with him for another six months before that. Something about that sticks in her brain, and she frowns while she takes another drink, teasing it out. Two years with the RAC, with Johnny as her partner, that means something.

And then, in a rush, there it is, the puzzle piece she's been waiting for sliding into place: a twist of wire that she keeps in a drawer in her room, John's earnest face, the first time he called her a duchess instead of a queen. She's been so sure in him as her partner that she never blinked after those first few weeks, never thought that John would even consider that there could be an expiration date on their partnership.

“Oh, hells,” she says, already standing up. “Sorry, Joe, rain check on the drinks? I'll buy you a round at the Royale soon, but I need to beat some sense into my partner.”

Joe sighs, long-suffering, but she's already out the door.

*

By the time John makes it back to Lucy, Dutch has worked herself into something between panic and rage, and the second the door shuts behind him, she turns on him. “How could you be so _stupid_?”

He puts his hands in the air like he's expecting her to shoot at him, even though she doesn't have a gun in her hands. “Whoa, whoa, what did I do now? I thought the job went fine!”

She smacks her open palm against his shoulder, and is only glad that she could restrain herself from a punch. “You complete _idiot_ , I am not going to leave you. I never would.”

That jars his mouth open, expressions passing over his face so fast she can't parse them. “Want to tell me where this is coming from?”

“I'd forgotten about the Two-year.” John's eyes go wide. “It never occurred to me that you might still think I'd want to dissolve the partnership, or leave, so I forgot. You've been worrying about it.”

“Me?” He scoffs, and he's never been as convincing as he wants to be when he's unbalanced. “I don't worry about anything at all. Although it's bad form to forget our anniversary, Duchess. Might have to downgrade you for that. Shit, what's below a duchess? I looked it up one time.”

“While it varies from planet to planet, many planets with the rank of duchess rank a countess just below it, John,” Lucy says, serene, and Dutch is glad for the interruption, because it gives her a chance to breathe.

Even with a chance to breathe, though, she isn't sure what to say. Part of her thinks the answer is to lunge forward and kiss him. They're everything else to each other, after all, and she loves him more than she think she's capable of loving anyone else. She thinks if she did it, he wouldn't look back, or question it, and that if she doesn't, he'll never even think of doing it himself. For a wild moment, she thinks about doing it, the thought of how easy it would be to dive in headfirst tempting her. After a breath, she calms the urge. She's trying to tell him that she doesn't want anything to change, and she can't do that by changing everything. “I'm not going to leave you,” she says instead.

“Hey, I know that,” he says, and that's a lie too.

“I'm not. You said—you've always said. We leave, or we stay, but either way it's _we_.” And she doesn't know how to make that clearer, if it's somehow not clear after their years together. Dutch was never trained to say what she feels, but with John, she at least tries to show him. “I thought you knew that,” she says, a little lost. “We're partners forever. As long as you want to be.” If one of them is going to leave, it's going to be him, and she hates that he doesn't know it.

“You don't want to make another two-year agreement, then?”

Another two years to forget that he somehow thinks this is temporary, and another conversation like this when it's over and she wonders what's wrong. Four years, with John always thinking that the other shoe is going to drop and she's going to leave him. She can't bear that. “No. We're not Qreshi nobility.” He opens his mouth, probably to remind her that she's some kind of nobility, and she shakes her head. “This isn't about dynasties or purity of blood. I'm not going to get bored. Nothing better is going to come along for me.”

“Okay, okay, you don't have to get all touchy-feely about—”

“Apparently I do!” She winces when he does, because she's still standing quite close to him and she's definitely shouting. “I wish you'd brought it up a year ago, not waited until it was almost time and started worrying. What were you going to do? Leave unless I asked you to stay?” Her voice dries up on the words, at the thought of coming back to Lucy someday and finding John gone just because she hadn't had the foresight of telling him she never wants him to go.

“No.” That finally makes him drop his attempts at seeming unbothered. He reaches his hands out, hovering, almost touching her. “No, Dutch, I would never. I was just putting off asking. Kind of hoping you forgot but also feeling like … I promised. And I don't ever want to trap you.”

Dutch swallows. She doesn't talk about her past much more than he talks about his, in glancing references that could be taken as jokes or exaggerations by people who aren't paying attention or who don't know her well. But he knows who she was, and knows where she grew up, because she was famous, after all. He knows what it means to her to have her freedom. “I don't feel trapped with you. I don't think I could.”

“Okay.” Something relaxes in his face, and she relaxes too. That has to be the worst of it. He believes her now, that she doesn't want this to be just temporary, even if he might not quite believe all of it. “Gee, Dutch, you must want to keep me around if you're this willing to talk about your feelings.”

She hugs him, just because she's close enough to and because it's easier to do than to say. John inhales, startled, and she thinks he's going to disengage, but he holds on instead, and she makes sure not to let him go until he's relaxed instead of startled. “Don't get used to it,” she warns. “I may always mean it, but I'm not good at saying it.”

“I'll keep it in mind.” His voice is warm again, no hint of stress, and it's an illustration of just how tense he's been for the past few weeks. “And I'll try to pay better attention next time.”

“See that you do,” she says, and holds on until he lets go.

*

Dutch doesn't get him a ring, not even a twist of wire like he got her. Another ring might be seen as a temporary gesture. Instead, she gives them both some time off without warrants, buys him a gun to give him on his birthday, and tracks him down in the cockpit one evening.

“I'm going to teach you how to fight,” she says, and he raises his eyebrows. “You want to be better, you're impatient to rise through the ranks, so I'm going to teach you.” She's not sure she wants him to be level five, despite the prestige, because she doesn't want to take any of those jobs, doesn't want to be someone's assassin again, but she wants him to be good enough that he might as well be. The better he is in a fight, the safer it is for him to be around her. “Come on, we're going down to the cargo hold and I'm going to teach you how to throw a punch.”

“I already know how to throw a punch,” he complains, but he's already standing up, letting her tow him along in her wake. “Can't I just be the smart tech guy and you be the punching things girl? That's why we're such a great team.”

“We are a great team, but we're going to be a better one if we both know a little of what the other one is doing, and I'd like you to not die horribly in a bar fight.”

“Dutch, I'm blushing,” he says, but the tease seems more absent than anything else, and he doesn't complain anymore.

“You'll be rising through the ranks in no time,” she promises, and molds his hand into a perfect fist. She's never going to give him a knife and tell him to use it, never going to be Khlyen, but she's going to make him safe. “Now pay attention, and we're going to be the best team in the RAC in no time at all.”

Johnny grins at her. “As though we aren't already,” he says, and settles in for the lesson.


End file.
